How We'd Spend $500/$2,500/$10,000 to Grow Our Podcast (& the Lessons You Can Apply to Any Budget)
How We'd Spend $500/$2,500/$10,000 to Grow Our Podcast (& the Lessons You Can Apply to Any Budget) How We'd Spend $500/$2,500/$10,000 to Grow Our Podcast (& the Lessons You Can Apply to Any Budget)
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How We'd Spend $500/$2,500/$10,000 to Grow Our Podcast (& the Lessons You Can Apply to Any Budget)
00:00 Could we grow faster if we had more budget? 02:47 How much the average podcast spends on production & marketing 06:41 How much high-growth shows allocate to marketing 08:11 How we’d spend $500/month to grow 15:23 How we’d spend $2,500/mo to grow 27:23 How to figure out what brought people to your show 31:00 How we’d spend $10,000/mo to grow 38:03 Understanding your brand 50:24 Running retargeting ads to your podcast 52:33 How we’d grow our podcast with zero budget
⭐️ Get a free podcast marketing audit with personalized recommendations to help you grow: https://podcastmarketingacademy.com/audit ⭐️
00:00 Could we grow faster if we had more budget? 02:47 How much the average podcast spends on production & marketing 06:41 How much high-growth shows allocate to marketing 08:11 How we’d spend $500/month to grow 15:23 How we’d spend $2,500/mo to grow 27:23 How to figure out what brought people to your show 31:00 How we’d spend $10,000/mo to grow 38:03 Understanding your brand 50:24 Running retargeting ads to your podcast 52:33 How we’d grow our podcast with zero budget
⭐️ Get a free podcast marketing audit with personalized recommendations to help you grow: https://podcastmarketingacademy.com/audit ⭐️
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Host
Justin Jackson
⚡ Bootstrapping, podcasting, calm companies, business ethics. Co-founder of @transistorfm (podcast hosting).
What is Podcast Marketing Trends Explained: Data-Driven Podcast Growth Strategies?
It's easier than ever to launch and produce a podcast. But it's never been harder to grow one.
On this show, we break down and explore what the data says about what it takes to market and grow a podcast in 2025 to help you make smarter decisions about your show, grow faster, and earn more.
Together, cohosts—and longtime podcasters, creators, and marketers—Jeremy Enns (Podcast Marketing Academy) and Justin Jackson (Transistor.fm) explore topics like:
How do you define success for your podcast?
What are the most effective marketing strategies, tactics, and growth channels for podcasts?
What does the data say about how to structure your show and episodes?
Which social media channels should you focus on as a podcaster?
How do you stack up to other shows?
Using the data uncovered by the annual Podcast Marketing Trends Report, our goal is to make sense of the numbers and turn them into actionable insights that you can use to create a better show and market it more effectively.
You can find the latest report at podcastmarketingtrends.com.
Justin:
So, Jeremy, I was looking at the podcast stats for this podcast. And at this point in time, each episode gets on average 260 downloads in the first 30 days, and we're spending about a $100 per episode on editing. Yeah. If we had more money for promotion, do you think we'd be able to significantly increase our growth trajectory for the show? Like, would we be able to get to a 1,000 downloads per episode in, let's say, 3 months?
Justin:
If you had budget, do you think you could deploy that capital and then in 3 months, get us up to a1000? And do you think if we just kept doing the promotional work we're doing now, we'd get to a 1000 downloads per month, whether we were spending money or not.
Jeremy:
Welcome to podcast marketing trends explained. I'm Jeremy Enns from Podcast Marketing Academy.
Justin:
And I'm Justin Jackson from transistor.fm. And together, we're digging into the data behind the podcast marketing trends 2023 report to help you understand what it means for you and your show.
Jeremy:
Our goal is to help you make better informed decisions about the way you create and market your show so you can spend more time on what actually matters for growth and accelerate your results.
Justin:
Let's get into it.
Jeremy:
So I'm gonna go bold and I'm gonna say that we could do both. I think that we could get there faster, to that 1,000 downloads, within 3 months. I think that we could also, if we set our minds to it, with 0 additional budget could also get to a 1000 downloads a month. So I'm gonna say both are possible and but I actually think that this is an interesting idea to to structure this episode around is maybe we look at some of the different budgets that we might have and say, how would we use that to be able to grow as quickly as possible? What do you what do you think if we're kinda gonna divide this up into maybe, like, 3 tiers of budget?
Jeremy:
What makes sense in regards to what the typical podcaster might have?
Justin:
Okay. I mean, full disclosure. I don't think I've ever spent personally more than $500 a month.
Jeremy:
Mhmm.
Justin:
So let's do 500 as one tier.
Jeremy:
Okay.
Justin:
For a second tier, maybe 25100. I'm thinking there might be some shows that are in that area. And then
Jeremy:
Let's go big. Let's go big for the last one.
Justin:
Okay. Say
Jeremy:
10 10 k a month podcast budget. 10 k. So 5125110 k. Sound
Justin:
good? Okay. Sure. That that's it feels kinda like you're getting into the bootstrap level, and then we get into kind of fantasy league up at the $10,000 a month. But that'd be fun.
Justin:
So $10,000 per month, 25100 per month, or 500 per month.
Jeremy:
That's right. Now before we go into this, I'm gonna look at the the data first and bring this in from the report, and let's see how these kind of tiers align with where people were at. Okay? Sound good
Justin:
to you? Yeah. I'm curious. I'm curious to see where, like, real podcasters are spending their money because, again, like, from my experience, I've only spent up to 500.
Jeremy:
Yeah. So I've got the the data up here. And in this section of the report, we were looking at dividing the monthly budget. And this is both for everything kind of production, marketing, anything related to the show. We divided it up by the growth rate of the shows and so we had shows that grew by more than a 100% a year.
Jeremy:
That was one category. Shows that grew by 21% to 100 100 percent and so 21% was the the median. So anything that outperformed the median, they're the 2nd tier. The 3rd tier was 0 to 20% growth. So these ones show still grew over the course of the year but grew less than the median and then we had shows that actually shrunk.
Jeremy:
So these are our 4 categories here.
Justin:
And Okay.
Jeremy:
What we see here, the I'll start off with the the overall average budget for the whole dataset. The average budget for shows that submitted here was $730 a month. This is in, USD. So $730 a month was the typical show in the overall kind of 500 plus shows that submitted data to this report. What's your kind of initial take on that?
Jeremy:
This is already outspending you apparently.
Justin:
Yeah. I'm surprised. I'm surprised that shows are spending this much. I I think this kind of goes back to that thing you mentioned right off the top of the show, which is you think you could we could get increase our downloads on our own without adding more budget and with adding budget. There's 2 paths there.
Justin:
And so for folks that are taking the path of, you know what, I'm not going to put my sweat equity into this. I'm going to actually like spend to acquire new listeners or spend to make the show better or whatever. Yeah. This is fascinating to me. I I wouldn't have expected numbers this high.
Jeremy:
Now there is a interesting caveat here. If we look at the biggest category here, the shows that grew by the most. And so these are the shows that grew by more than a 100% so they doubled at least in size. The average, total budget of this category was $11.35 a month. And so this is, you know, getting to be quite a significant budget.
Jeremy:
Although, you know, we're gonna look at, you know, playing big with a $10,000 a month budget. Still, this is far off. So many shows were doubling in size at just a little over $1,000 a month. So that's that's kind of encouraging. But what's actually even more interesting is that there was one show in that highest growth category that they actually had a typical average monthly budget of somewhere in the range of, like, $17,500.
Jeremy:
And so Wow. There's one kind of huge outlier show, and I was curious. Okay. So they're just dragging the average up across all the shows in that category and the whole kind of entire dataset. And so I was curious, you know, what happens if we remove that show?
Jeremy:
And it turns out that if that show was removed, then the highest growth category actually only had an average monthly budget of $480 And what's even more interesting about this so $480, the next highest growth category was $753 a month. The next highest was 654 and the shows that actually shrunk were 487. And so, actually, the shows that grew by more than a 100%, if we remove that one outlier, they actually had the lowest monthly budget of all the shows, which is just utterly fascinating to me.
Justin:
Wow. And so this includes editing, production costs, hosting, software, rentals, all that stuff.
Jeremy:
To the show. Yep. Their ongoing monthly production costs, marketing costs, kind of team support, that kind of thing factored into these, these costs.
Justin:
Fascinating. I I mean, that is counterintuitive that the highest growth shows are spending the least. Right?
Jeremy:
Yeah. I also asked in the survey, what percentage did people allocate to marketing? And so here we actually saw that the group that had the highest growth actually did spend the most on marketing. So they allocated 29% of their budget to marketing and this was actually very linear here. What you would expect, the next highest growth group allocated 21%.
Jeremy:
The next highest was 12%. Here, much more what you would expect. The low growth shows kind of a lower amount dedicated to marketing. And once we remove that outlier show, they actually spent lower than the the average in that tier. So the the number even went up higher.
Jeremy:
And so I think that it was 30 or 31% of that high growth group that they allocated of their budget towards marketing. So that's another interesting
Justin:
kind of,
Jeremy:
takeaway there from the Yeah.
Justin:
You know what I like about that is it gives me a benchmark to do experiments against. So if I'm saying, well, my monthly budget is a $100, maybe I could put $30 aside for some form of promotion and just start experimenting. I'm going to invest that in some form of promotion, and then I'm gonna see if there's any sort of cause and effect. You know, deploying this capital this way, I'm always thinking, like, for myself, I might take that benchmark 30% and start to think about how I might do that for my show. How can we implement a regular marketing spend for our podcast?
Jeremy:
Yeah. So, maybe let's get into the the hypotheticals here then, shall we? Okay. So, the first tier here, we're gonna look at $500 a month. And so this is kinda very much in line with the typical show who submitted the survey.
Jeremy:
So this seems to be where most people are at. So, let's start off with you here, and I would love to hear if you had $500 a month to allocate across your show. So this is not just marketing. This is everything production, all of the kind of, behind the scenes costs and everything. Where does that $500 get spent for you?
Justin:
Okay. So hosting and recording software, that's about $50. Editing, about $85 per episode times 4. So that's about $340. And then I just put the rest into newsletter sponsorship.
Justin:
Oh, okay. So a $120 into newsletter sponsorship.
Jeremy:
And, walk us through your approach to newsletter sponsorship here. I just thought if I was gonna experiment and I had a
Justin:
could match up with my topic. And there's a lot of them that are looking for sponsors. And it just felt like, well, that's an easy one and it's trackable. I could see how many clicks we got from that newsletter. If I use something like Chartable or Linkfire, I could even track that link all the way to listenership.
Justin:
So it felt like it's fairly easy to deploy, especially if you have a specific niche. It's easy to find those newsletters and then try it out. And, yeah, it just felt like that would be the first experiment I would try over anything else. And it's you don't have to be super sophisticated. So Right.
Justin:
As soon as you get into Facebook ads and Google ads, it's, like, requires a certain sophistication. Mhmm. But newsletter sponsorships are usually you reach out and say, hey, can I sponsor for a $100? And they say yes or no or whatever. And they're trackable.
Justin:
So I just like the simplicity of it.
Jeremy:
Yep. And so in this, scenario, you are linking directly to the show. Is that what you would, submit as your link to the newsletter?
Justin:
Yeah. I would link to the show or probably even a specific episode. I would Okay. I would try to say, hey. In this latest episode, Jeremy and Justin talk about podcast marketing budgets.
Justin:
If you're interested in that, click here and listen in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever. And then I would see how many people actually listen to that episode. So, yeah, I would try to pitch the show on a probably on a specific episode. Like, can I get can I hook people into listening based on this episode's promise or this episode's topic?
Jeremy:
Yeah. And, you know, that goes to something that we talked about in one of the previous roasts, and this was for the show How Fitting, where we talked a lot about specificity of language. In this case, we were talking about the episode titles and the show description. But really with any kind of marketing and advertising, the more specific you can get with, like, the promise of what people are gonna get from this thing, especially if they're unfamiliar with you, the more, like, real and visual and tangible that you can make it feel that they're gonna get some value out of this. Like, that's what you're fighting against.
Jeremy:
And so specificity is a big kind of, aid in in that.
Justin:
Yeah. Exactly. Now what about your budget? What was your $500 budget?
Jeremy:
Okay. So I, I had kinda $250 a month on general tooling. And so Okay. This was a lot of the same things that that you had here. So we've got the hosting.
Jeremy:
We've got your podcast editing program. And, you know, you you mentioned that you might have an editor but also a podcast editing tool. I have hired many editors throughout the years and also still find myself tweaking things. So from my experience, I know that I, as a sound engineer, like, am a tinkerer when it comes to audio and video stuff. And So, no, I'm still going to be doing editing and tools like Descript, which we use for the show.
Jeremy:
You can have kind of this collaborative workspace where the editor can get it 95% of the way there. And then I can go make some kind of content edits or something like that and and finish things off. So I would have, probably both of those costs. Probably there's some kind of email service provider. I use Convert Kit here and love them and, like, what's interesting about some of these tools is it's very dependent on where you're at.
Jeremy:
So Convert Kit, I know, has a free plan but then I don't know how much I pay now. It's it's a lot. It's like super expensive. It's one of the biggest costs in my business because my list has grown quite a bit. And so that's it's both nice, but it becomes something of a almost burden down the line where you're like I mean, hopefully, if you have a list of, you know, 10,000, 20000 people, you're profiting from it and it's paying for itself.
Jeremy:
But,
Justin:
I
Jeremy:
I certainly know lots of people with newsletters who do not have that benefit where they built big lists and haven't found a way to monetize and now have this, you know, $500 a month in paying for their email service provider. In this case, we're gonna just assume that this is a lower amount. But email service provider, I'm thinking a tool like Cast Magic maybe, which I use and, to do some of the automated show notes stuff. At this point, I'm not gonna hire someone to do show notes. I probably don't wanna do a ton of it myself.
Jeremy:
And I'm just not that particular. So if I can get a pretty good version out there and I make a few tweaks, fine. I'm fine with that. Yeah. Other tools I'm looking at here are probably something like Calendly and then something like Zapier where I think you can automate a lot.
Jeremy:
I use Zapier like crazy. This is another one of the big costs in my business now. ConvertKit and Zapier are probably my 2 big biggest tech bills, and that's something that they increase in price the more you use them. But I I can't even think like how much time I must save by using Zapier to automate so many different things that it must be, you know, at this point, there's so much stuff that's happened behind the scenes that's built up over years. It must be like at least 20 hours a week, probably of stuff that I could just not even do anymore.
Jeremy:
So that's my kind of tooling side of things here. And so that's around $250 a month. That's about half of the the $500 a month budget. And the one thing I will say on that is like, I like like most everyone started cobbling together all the free tools. And if you have the budget to spend on it, I just think this is such a great use of that budget.
Jeremy:
Like you realize how insufficient a lot of your tools were and how cobbled together a lot of your solutions were after you actually just paid for the tool. And you're like, oh, this actually just works and it's so much easier. And I don't need to do these 3 different things. So I'm very happy to spend on tooling for the most part.
Justin:
Yeah.
Jeremy:
So yeah that that's that's the first half of the budget. The second half I have, everything else would go to podcast support of some way. So this would, I think, for me depend a little bit on what the show is. And so if I had a high production value show or something like that, probably I can't hire an editor in that range to do what I wanna do. So maybe I do that myself.
Jeremy:
And so then I'm gonna be looking at some kind of like podcast BA who can help with scheduling and uploading and a lot of that type of stuff. If it is more of a kind of interview show that doesn't need a lot of editing, probably I'm going with a podcast editor and maybe I'll handle some of the the back end stuff or maybe I can afford both depending on the the price there. So would depend a little bit on what the workflow is, what the show is. And, in our case, you know, a show like ours, it's not like a super high production value. So I think editor would be the first thing for me.
Jeremy:
And then a BA might be secondary if there's anything that I can do, even a couple hours a week, at something like, you know, $25 an hour, $30 an hour, is is definitely worth it for me. So that's that's where my budget's going at the $500 a month level.
Justin:
Wow. And nothing on advertising? Nothing on advertising.
Jeremy:
Nothing on advertising. Not yet. May maybe in one of the, the future tiers here, but I'm gonna save it. And, $500 a month, I'm outsourcing stuff that I don't wanna do. We'll maybe get into this a little bit more, but my big belief is that the you as the host are the best marketer of your show.
Jeremy:
And so I wanna free up my time to be able to promote it myself, and I think that's where, you know, that time is gonna get the best ROI.
Justin:
Okay. Do you wanna jump into $25100?
Jeremy:
Okay. Let's, I'll I'll keep going. I'll keep going with the 25100 here. So Okay. Amping it up quite a bit.
Jeremy:
This is 5 x the budget. So we're going from 500 up to 25100. This was more than double the highest tier, in our, podcast marketing trends report. And that's that's including that outlier show. It's even more than that, more than double if we remove that one.
Jeremy:
So here, I'm actually I'm still I'm I'm not going with any advertising yet at this point. $25100 a month. I'm amping up my tooling. So now we're up to 750 a month I've got here. So I might be adding some potentially social media kinda scheduling and engagement type tools and things like that.
Jeremy:
There's some kinda cool stuff on mainly Twitter is where a lot of this tooling is where you can do auto DMs and replies and things like that where you can say, like, hey. We're doing a giveaway. Put this emoji in the the comment and I'll send you this thing. And so there's a lot of great engagement stuff you can do with tools like that if you have them. So I'm probably adding on something like that at this point and that might even fit in the $500 a month.
Jeremy:
I, have recently upgraded into the paid version of Chartable and am, nerding out over the data there. I've been on the free plan for many years but this is something that I would definitely invest in. And one of the big reasons is for the cross promotion tracking attribution. And so for doing feed drops or cross promos with other shows, this is something that I wanna be serious about and being able to track, like, how are these actually working is a big deal. And you can only get that with the paid, chartable plan, I believe.
Jeremy:
Or if you can get it on the free plan, it's like 1 a month or something like that, which maybe it's enough for for some people. But, I would probably like to do more of that. And then there's probably a bunch of other miscellaneous tools. So I'm thinking is I I do a lot of, like, surveying and quizzes and stuff like that. It's probably also some kind of design tools, Figma, Canva Pro.
Jeremy:
I think you run into some constraints at some point when you're doing design, and marketing just always kinda requires some kind of design happening. So that's that's kind of the tooling side, 750 a month.
Justin:
You know, a lot of these tools you're mentioning are tools I pay for, but I didn't put it in my budget. I I just completely didn't think about it. But, like, Canva? I mean Yeah. You kinda need it's almost like you need to have a Canvas subscription just for doing miscellaneous graphics, for doing episode art, for, you know, coming you could even pay a designer to set up a nice template for you and then just keep reusing it.
Justin:
So your budgets, I think, are more realistic on the on the tooling side than mine are. You've done a good job of, like, listing them out because realistically, you're probably going to have an email newsletter. You're probably going to have some automation software. And so making a budget for these things, I think, is a good idea.
Jeremy:
And the other thing like that I also have noticed for myself is that, like, a lot of these tools, the more stuff you do online, the more you end up using these tools for everything. And so if podcasting is your first creative medium or or anything like that, it it might be like, oh man, I'm spending so much on my podcast. But a lot of those tools you can use in so many different ways. And so my costs have actually stayed pretty even over the past 3 years, from running a podcast agency to being a, like, blogger and newsletter writer and in and out of podcasting and into video stuff. Like, a lot of the tools, it's like they just form this base layer where you kinda just need all the stuff, email marketing, social media scheduling, graphic design, some kind of like project management system.
Jeremy:
And so there's all the stuff that you end up just making use of everywhere. And I think keeping that in mind for me, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna pay for this now, but actually I can use this in so many different ways. And actually a great example of this, I just started doing this this week, is a tool like Cast Magic. They actually have a bunch of presets specifically for people who are educators or coaches or consultants. And so I've started creating some templates where I can just upload my coaching sessions with clients to that and so then I can kind of ask they have this like magic chat AI feature where you can ask like, hey.
Jeremy:
Did we talk about this at all or where did we talk about this? And so I can kinda remember, like, oh, yeah. I I this I know I was searching for this, and I need to follow-up with them about this or give them a resource or something. And so you can get a lot of mileage out of some of these tools, if you can kinda think a little bit even beyond podcasting.
Justin:
And and think about the tools you're using already that may have added some of these features. Descript has an AI chat tool as well, and I just remembered about it the other day. I was like, oh, wait a second. Let me try this out. So there's some of the tools you're using already might have built in some of this functionality.
Justin:
And, it's worth, you know, if you wanna consolidate more of your costs into a few just a few tools, that might be another way to go. Yeah. How do you spend the rest of your budget?
Jeremy:
Yeah. 17.50 remaining here. And so in this case, I'm actually not really adding on anything new here. But I'm looking at this case, we got 17.50. This is again going to full on outsourcing podcast support.
Jeremy:
And so I think for me, I want to free up as much of my time as possible and this additional budget allows me to do more of that. And so at this tier, probably previously was like either a VA or an audio editor at the 500 a month. Maybe I could squeeze out a little bit out of both of those. But here, I'm probably looking at getting a audio slash video editor. So somebody who can do both to a probably an amazing degree of both of those but a pretty solid degree where, you know, you can get a pretty good like a show that looks like hours on YouTube which I think is is pretty solid for what we've been able to do with the script.
Jeremy:
But that's something that I would invest in is getting somebody who can like really make it look good on video as well. Because I think if you're gonna do YouTube and if you ex have any expectations around it, I think it needs to look good on video and because that's what people expect on YouTube. And so at this stage, I'm gonna start putting some fairly decent budget towards that. And then I'm thinking the other, $750 a month towards the VA which is just taking on more and more of those like background tasks that, you know, we all have them. There's things that we get stuck doing that are just this admin kind of mundane stuff that needs to get done.
Jeremy:
There's no way around it. We can't automate it. And then there's also a bunch of stuff that we would like to do but don't have the opportunity to do it because we just don't have the time. So that I would hand off more of those things to a VA. So that's, that's my budget there.
Jeremy:
17.50 to podcast support, outsourcing, and then 7.50, for tooling at the $25100 a month, a tier.
Justin:
Fascinating. Okay.
Jeremy:
Let's hear what you got. So I I'm the grounded one here, apparently, with all the line by line items here. Let's hear the big dreaming, $25100 a month, budget from Justin.
Justin:
Now to put this in context, I think right now in my journey as a marketer, I've become more curious about paid acquisition. Traditionally, I haven't done a lot of paid acquisition. I've been mostly focused on content marketing, search engine optimization, PR, networking, relationships, and social media. And so I'm curious at this point in my journey about paid acquisition. To give you some context, let's say that, you know, for the company I'm with right now, we have 1,000,000 of dollars in revenue.
Justin:
You're gonna think this is hilarious. Guess how much we spent on ads last year?
Jeremy:
Okay. So I'm gonna think it's hilarious. So it's gonna be low, but how low? I'm I'm gonna say, k. 1,000,000 of dollars in revenue.
Jeremy:
I'm gonna say, $5,000.
Justin:
Just over $1200 last year in ads.
Jeremy:
I think I spent more than you on ads.
Justin:
Yeah. I I have not done very much paid acquisition. You know, this year, I wanna increase that budget to $5,000. I'm curious about it, but I don't have a lot of experience with it. So in this fantasy world, I'm I'm dedicating more towards advertising.
Justin:
So tools, it looks like tools is still under a $100, $49 for hosting, $29 for recording software. Paying for an editor, still $85 per episode times 4. That's $340. This time, I'm investing another $85 per episode on clips, editing, and posting. So getting someone to edit little short TikTok reels and Instagram reels.
Justin:
So that's another 340. And then I split my marketing into newsletter sponsorship, about $870, and then podcast ads. So putting ads on other podcasts, another $870 for the same reason. If you're in a niche and you're looking for an audience like yours, it feels like there's all these independent creators that have done the hard work of building an audience. And they can, you can kind of get their recommendation by advertising on their show or in their newsletter.
Justin:
And if the pitch is good, then you might get a bunch of their audience to follow you and check out your show. So that's my budget just splurging big time on ads, even though I didn't spend this much on ads myself last year. I'm going in on ads because I'm curious about it. I wanna see how it works out. And now the tracking tools, like you said, have gotten better.
Justin:
I should have put in my budget here some money for
Jeremy:
You don't have access to Chartable at this point, so you're not gonna be able to track anything, unfortunately.
Justin:
I know. I I'll reduce my ad budget a little bit to get Chartable or Linkfire subscription.
Jeremy:
Yeah. So one of the things that I love about this is that you've got 2 different advertising channels. And I think that this is one of the things that I mean, we've talked before about the importance of experimentation in marketing. But in advertising, really, experimentation is the whole job. And I think that a lot of people tend to view advertising in a few different levels of awareness of how it works.
Jeremy:
And one is just like level 1 is just, okay. You just put money. You just boost the post and people find it. And, you know, people will see it. Probably, they're not gonna click back through.
Jeremy:
Level 2 is kind of looking at like this mystical thing, I think, where people think like, oh, you need to get some kind of, like, copywriting wizard. Somebody who can just, like, get the perfect creative, the the visuals and the copy and all of this. Who knows all the stuff about the back end of Facebook that I just don't know and so I can't do it. And then I think level 3, like the master level here, these are very, chunky broad levels, only 3 levels of advertising proficiency, but we're running with it. Level 3 is really looking at, like, when you talk to people who are really savvy advertisers, you realize that they go in and they're like, I don't know anything.
Jeremy:
I don't know what people are gonna click on. And the whole job of advertising is just extensively testing. And so if you talk to people who are Facebook ads experts or Google ads experts, what you realize is that they are testing 100 of iterations over the course of a campaign. It will often run for months or if it's successful, years and they're just constantly testing different headlines, different copy, different graphics. And you realize that there are so many permutations of this ad and ultimately they come from this humble place of, like, we have no idea going in what is going to work.
Jeremy:
We have some general, like, suspicions, like, maybe this will work. And the more kind of, like, listener or customer research you've done, you've done, the closer you're gonna be to that. But you're just kind of like, we're just gonna put stuff out there and we're gonna let people decide. And whatever gets clicked on, like, okay, we'll do more of that and then we'll test it against something else. And to me, this is something that's actually it's encouraging in one way because it kind of dispels the idea of these like advertising copywriting genius.
Jeremy:
It's discouraging in another way because what that means is that you actually need a pretty significant budget before you get to the point where you realize what actually works. And it's not to say you need 1,000,000 of dollars in advertising spend to get there, but you certainly need probably several $1,000 at a minimum before you're like, really? You've let this run for 3 months, let's just say on Facebook. And you're now like, okay. We've got to a pretty good point where we've weeded out a lot of the underperforming ads and we're at something that is starting to get pretty good.
Jeremy:
And you realize, like, that's when the cost per acquisition starts to come down, But it actually starts off really high and you don't get to that optimization point till you've done a lot of testing. And so this is something with your 2 you you kind of mediums. You're like looking at like, okay. I'm gonna try some different places because I actually don't know what is going to work best for advertising for my show. Maybe newsletters do better.
Jeremy:
Maybe podcasts do better. I'm not actually gonna know until I test both of those and measure the results.
Justin:
Yeah. I have this idea that I've always wanted to do in terms of testing. I don't exactly know how it would work out, but I I'll share it anyway because I think it's interesting, is to publish a bonus episode called secret episode or something like that.
Jeremy:
Mhmm.
Justin:
And the the bonus episode, you say, hey. It's Justin. I'm the host of the show. And I'm wondering what's going on in your life that brought you here today? This is a small independent show.
Justin:
And knowing where people come from and why they were attracted to the show is super helpful. In your show notes, there are different links. Click the one that applies to you and it goes to like a Google form and then get them to fill out a just a short survey. Then you get some anecdotal, some qualitative data to go with all this like quantitative data you're getting from different tracking tools. I've only done this in email, like in a welcome email asking people, hey, what's going on in your life that brought you here today?
Justin:
I would love to try this with podcasting. And the thing with a bonus episode is I would almost keep changing the publish date on it so it keeps showing up as a recent episode for a while just to test it out while I'm running a campaign and seeing if I can get some responses from folks on what drew them to the show, where did they come from. And then I would track in the show notes. I I would have different links. Like, if you came here via this campaign, click on this link.
Justin:
So then I at least get some okay. People came from that newsletter. They clicked on this link. If you came from the podcast ad I did, then click on this link. If you came from somewhere else, click on this link.
Justin:
And so then I'd have these 3 different tiers, 3 different forms, and I'd start to test things out. And then I'd also probably put those links in regular episodes as well. Yep. And maybe also run my own dynamic ad insertion campaign, getting people to say, hey. Like, there's links in the show notes, click on them, respond.
Justin:
And I would find that fascinating to hear, okay, I came from this ad, but here's what drew me to the show. Okay. I I gotta double down on that.
Jeremy:
Yeah. This is something I've had a very similar thought in the past, and it's something I've done in my newsletters. And you see a decent number of people do this in the newsletters where they'll essentially have a poll at the end. It's like, what did you think of this issue? It's like, great, mediocre, like, not that great.
Jeremy:
And, for anybody who listens in Spotify, I've actually started doing this in all the Spotify polls. And so if you're listening to this on Spotify or if you're not, you can go check out. You can see for this episode, you can see there'll be a poll there that says, like, how do we do on this episode? And you can rate there's one of 4 options. And I wanted 4 options because I didn't want there to be an even 50.
Jeremy:
I wanted either positive or negative sentiment, kind of high positive, high negative, or medium each to see, you know, how people think we're doing. But I thought about doing the same idea in the show notes for a long time. Just having 3 links or 4 links or whatever and just say like, hey. What do you think about this show? And that link then goes to a page on my website where there's a form or something like that where I can collect some more information.
Jeremy:
Plus you can also so you would have 4 pages for each of the ratings And over time you could see, okay, I can see that website traffic here in my analytics. And I can see that, okay, like the mediocre page gets the most clicks and then we got, like, a 1,000 clicks on that. We only got, like, 250 on the great. And so, like, okay, that you can kinda measure some audience sentiment in a way that's anonymous to them and they it's also really frictionless. All they need to do is go to the show notes, click one link to vote, and I I think more people should be doing this.
Jeremy:
And, like I said, I'm doing Spotify here for this show, but I might have to add those links to our show notes, for for all the people listening on any player as well.
Justin:
Yeah. I think it's worth testing. Should we do $10,000 budgets?
Jeremy:
Yeah. Let's ramp it up to the the dream world and okay. So you you already were going big on on 25100. So, I am fascinated to see where you take this when you, quadruple your budget now, and you've already could have spent more than your entire last year's annual advertising budget with the previous tier. I shutter to think what you're gonna do with it at, at 10 k a month.
Jeremy:
So lay it on me.
Justin:
Here's what's interesting about this tier, is this was the tier where I first started thinking about where hiring an external service actually makes sense. And I think you could actually do more of this on the lower budget tiers. So Mhmm. Hosting, I bumped it up to $99 per month. Instead of recording software, I just put podcast recording studio.
Justin:
And I looked up the rates for that, and it's surprising. It's a $120 per session.
Jeremy:
Yep. And
Justin:
so I thought, wow. That's interesting. Like, I could pay for the software myself and have to manage the whole thing myself, or I could just go to someone who does this for a living. They're paying for the the equivalent of Riverside or SquadCast or whatever, and I can just record in their nice studio for $120. And I'm guessing I'm gonna get a really nice video version of the podcast and a really nice audio version.
Justin:
So a $120 times 4, dollars 500 Editing still $85 per episode, clips editing and posting. Same thing. Newsletter sponsorship, I just bumped up to a 1000. Podcast ads, a 1000. Podcast coaching.
Justin:
The more I thought about this tier, I was like, if I had somebody that just did a call with me or a couple calls with me every month Yeah. And if I'm at a $10,000 a month budget Yeah. And they could help me 2 x or 3 x my efforts, that seems worth it. Coaching can cost all sorts of things, but I just said a $1,000 for that. Yep.
Justin:
Podcast producer. What if I had somebody who was just on this call with you and I? And as we're talking, they're like, hey, Justin, Jeremy, just pause for a second. I think we need to take this this direction because the arc of the show is kind of getting lost, and their whole job is just to improve the quality of the product. Yeah.
Justin:
You and I've talked about this lots. The product, the podcast episodes that you're producing is kind of the main deal. And if you can improve the quality, if you can make the show even more compelling, then it's worth the investment. So $2,000 for a podcast producer. And then the rest of my budget, almost $1200 each for each of these next three buckets.
Jeremy:
Okay.
Justin:
Instagram Reels, TikTok ads, YouTube Shorts ads. Just over $1200 for each of those ad marketplaces.
Jeremy:
Okay. And what's the, rationale here behind these three specific? You're kind of going away from what you were doing before, or is this in addition to your previous advertising exploits?
Justin:
I'm just curious about it. From my own browsing history, I'm on Instagram. I'm on TikTok. I'm on YouTube. And I'm seeing podcasts on there that look interesting.
Justin:
And I think if I posted organically on each of these platforms and then just paid to boost those clips
Jeremy:
Mhmm.
Justin:
I'd be curious to see this isn't like a 1 week experiment. This would be maybe over 6 months. Do I see a meaningful number of people after, you know, maybe they've seen my clips 5 or 6 times? Yeah. Do they then translate into podcast listeners?
Justin:
Do they open up Apple Podcasts and search for the show? So I'm I'm more curious curious about it. I think it would be an interesting experiment. And if I had the budget, I would like to try it out to see, can I meaningfully boost numbers by investing in clips short form clips on these platforms?
Jeremy:
Alright. Well, I mean, it sounds like, you do have the budget now. You got $10,000 a month. So I look forward to, hearing the results, when we we hear back, in a future episode.
Justin:
Okay. Yeah. So what about you? What $10,000 a month, how do your numbers break down in this fantasy world of, spending?
Jeremy:
Yeah. I mean, if this show takes off, not fantasy for long, hopefully. Yeah. For now, living in living in the clouds, it's actually interesting how some of our spending converged here. And so I bumped up my tooling another $250 to $1,000 a month.
Jeremy:
I figure stuff gets more expensive maybe. Hopefully, we're we're being successful. There's probably more stuff that I wanna add on. And potentially with more outsourcing, more endeavors, there's other stuff that kind of comes with it. So I'm just adding in some extra costs there to cover the unforeseen but inevitable increased expenses when it comes to tools.
Jeremy:
The the big category here is still going to be outsourcing for me. We've seen the theme here throughout, these these different tiers. The bulk of it is still going to outsourcing. So I've got 7,000 out of the 10,000 going to various outsourcing.
Justin:
Wow.
Jeremy:
So we've got a $1,000 a month to a BA handling all the kind of just ongoing behind the scenes stuff. We've got $2,000 a month now going to a specifically a video editor. And so I'm thinking I wanna go for a even more kind of video first YouTube friendly approach, which is likely going to, at this point, diverge from the audio version. And so probably this is gonna be a more condensed, more streamlined, more heavily edited version. There's probably gonna be more, like, one of the things I wish we could do with this show is when we're talking about something, pull in visuals and things like that.
Jeremy:
That. And it's just a lot of work to find that stuff. And it's easy enough in some senses. Like, it's not technically hard. I could figure it out.
Jeremy:
But finding the stuff, doing the work, and then if you think about adding in, like, fun animations and sound effects, like, you can reach another level with a actual video editor. And so I'm thinking $2,000 a month, You can get, I think, a pretty good quality video for that better than the majority of podcasts that are, on, on video. And I'm thinking here along the lines of, like, Jay Klaus, Justin Moore. They've got what I really as aspire to maybe from a video podcast perspective.
Justin:
Yeah. I like that. I like that too because it's investing in the product. And so if you are going to be active in video, whether it's YouTube or Instagram, wherever, having production quality, that's just the next level and really packaging the product and making really awesome. That would be worth experimenting with.
Justin:
You know, maybe it doesn't work. You have a baseline because you've been scrappy up to this point and go, Hey, I wonder if over the next 6 months, if we could meaningfully increase the number of viewers, but then viewers often lead to listeners. Can we meaningfully increase that number just by investing more in the quality of both, really, like, video and audio.
Jeremy:
Something that's worth talking about here is that there is a huge personal kind of sentiment behind this. And so, like, I'm a, you know, pure creator. I love audio, video, music, like photography, film, all the stuff. And so part of me is, like, if I have more budget, where I want to put it is into the creative. Like, that to me and even if I'm not the one doing it, I wanna create something that I'm really proud of.
Jeremy:
And so part of me just has this inclination. And I think the other part that I have recognized as both beneficial and challenging to some extent is I like brands. And so when I am creating a business and a brand, I wanna create something that like has a feeling and like looks great and that people look at it and, like, wow, that that looks really cool. And I personally feel like the brand that I want to convey has a high bar of quality. And so this is something that, you know, we we talk about in the the podcast roast with packaging and things like that.
Jeremy:
Like, I just really believe that the impressions that every touch point of your brand give people have a, over time, a significant impact on how they interact with your content and how memorable it is and if it keeps them coming back. And so for me, I have a high level of bar of quality that I just feel like I need to meet. And so it's almost like as I increase my capabilities, I wanna do that even higher. And so obviously the downside here is that then it makes it hard. Like I think it's kept me from creating a lot of projects where I'm like well, there's no way I'm gonna do it unless it's at this level And I can't do it at that level, so I might as well not do it at all.
Jeremy:
And that's Yeah. Not the right mindset to some extent. And so I kinda kinda oscillate between these two mindsets of, like, just be scrappy and, like, launch it and kinda build the plane as you're flying it. And also, like, yeah. But I also know I need to get it to this level for me to feel like it belongs in the, ecosystem of my brand.
Jeremy:
And so I think it's it's worth thinking about too where are your values and is brand and design valuable and content quality? Like where does that factor in? And some people it's not gonna be as much as it is for me and other people it's gonna be way more than it is for me. And I think that that dictates a lot of times where you spend your budget to some extent.
Justin:
Yeah. And if you think of shows you like and you appreciate, there it like I think about Darknet Diaries, which we've mentioned before, but the branding, the artwork, the social media images that he shares, the animations that he shares, it's all really high quality. The website looks incredible. And there is something compelling about that as a potential listener. If you said, hey.
Justin:
You gotta listen to the show Darknet Diaries. And I Google Darknet Diaries and I land on the website and it's like, this is like, you know, not that well done. Yep. But to see something really cool with amazing branding and amazing artwork, it's like, oh, wow. Maybe this is worth the investment to click play and listen a little bit and see if I like the show.
Jeremy:
Yeah. There's actually a, a psychological phenomenon here. It's called costly signaling, and this gets used a lot in marketing, but it also shows up in the animal kingdom. And so the classic example is the peacock's feathers. Birdsong is another one where, in this case, it's looking at, you know, mates.
Jeremy:
And, essentially, what it's signaling is that this animal is so robust that it can, quote, unquote, waste resources on its plumage for the peacock Mhmm. For spending time singing. And this actually also shows up in marketing where if you can afford to dedicate time to something that is not technically, like, rational, it signals to people whether or not they realize that that, like, wow. This must be really, like, legitimate and they're doing well if they can spend time on making this fancy design that has nothing to do with the podcast. And so, I mean, the more you go down the the marketing rabbit hole, this is this is the curse.
Jeremy:
It's like you realize, like, like, oh, all the small things really matter and I can't do all of them really well but to me, that's one of the things that I think about is like I do at every touch point and want to signal like, yes, this is worth your time. This is legitimate, and you you're not gonna be disappointed by engaging with this.
Justin:
Yeah. I agree. So what about the rest of your budget? Do you have any money left?
Jeremy:
So yeah. Oh, we we got we got lots of money left here. Oh, good. So we're, we're still in the outsourcing category here. We've got a $1,000 a month for BA, $2,000 for video editor.
Jeremy:
We also had that $1,000 for tooling. And so we are currently at, $4,000 spent. So the remaining 6,000, in addition to the video editor, I'm thinking we're also having a separate audio editor at this point who's just handling the audio stuff. These have kinda diverged into separate kinda processes. So that's gonna be maybe you know, I had it at 1 k a month here.
Jeremy:
Probably it could actually be quite bit lower if the video editor is doing at least a preliminary edit or something like that. Maybe they're separate. But, also potentially there's more production value. So we're we'll keep it at $1,000 a month for the audio editor. I have $500 a month for a thumbnail artist.
Jeremy:
I don't know where in the ballpark that fits so maybe some of it comes from the audio editor and actually is more for the thumbnail artist. But I'm thinking if I'm taking video and YouTube seriously, you just can't underestimate the value of the thumbnail and the title and so I am a decent designer, but I'm not at that level of designer. And so that's not something that I'm gonna be doing at this point. And then the final outsourcing cost here, very similar to yours, is a producer for the show. And so I have allocated here $25100 a month.
Jeremy:
Pretty similar to yours. I think you had 2,000. I think much to your point, it would be so great to have somebody who is, you know, on on the call with us here but also goes through the preproduction and works with us and kinda forces us into this kind of like, okay. We've got our ideas that we're going back and forth and they're like, okay. Come on.
Jeremy:
What's what's the arc here? Where are we going here? What is going to make this worth people's time? What's the through line in this episode? What are the story elements or the hooks that we can put into this and hold us accountable and also do some of that research and come up with some ideas beforehand and say, like, okay.
Jeremy:
We're talking about budgeting today. What about if we took this kind of format to this episode? And we were like, hey. That sounds great. We wouldn't have thought of that.
Jeremy:
And I've never worked with personally with a producer. I've actually been a producer so, I have played that role in in some instances But, I would love to have somebody to be able to outsource some of the creative energy that usually is solely on the host. So that's my kind of outsourcing category there.
Justin:
Yeah. And the other thing with Producer is they could also be active at every stage of the podcast's development. So
Jeremy:
Mhmm.
Justin:
Prerecording, during the recording, after the recording, they could be working with the editor to say, hey, you know, let's tighten up this part here. Let's add a little touches few touches here. So the idea of a producer is very compelling. And as we've talked about this, I've thought, you know, this is another category where people could experiment with it at lower monthly budgets. Even if you just said, you know what?
Justin:
I'm gonna do this for 2 months, hire somebody. That alone might be enough to improve the quality of your show. Like, they're just reviewing your show. And then, yeah, it'd be interesting for folks if they can allocate, maybe not like monthly forever, but for the next 3 months, I'm gonna spend a 100, 500, whatever, on a producer and see if it improves the quality of the show.
Jeremy:
Yeah. There have been so many instances where I've worked with a real professional in some regard. And even though it's a short engagement, it really upped my game because they were able to explain things to me not in an abstract sense of, like, reading a blog post or taking a course or something like that, but they've been in my world, in my space and, like, looking at what I'm doing and saying, okay. Here, what you should have done is this or, like, here, what we could do is this and here's how we can make it work. And I think that doing that for a limited run would be really illuminating.
Jeremy:
And especially on some of the areas where, you know, maybe most of us as hosts might not be so strong. And so maybe it's like a lot of people have, domain expertise in their topic, but they're not the world's best interviewers and they shouldn't be. Like, nobody should be a great interviewer just because you have conversations. That's not the same thing as being a great interviewer. And so I think we should all expect that like, okay, part of it is practice but part of it is having somebody who actually understands giving us notes.
Jeremy:
And like I would I would personally love to work with an expert interviewer, kind of coach to be able to say okay, I've got this interview coming up. How would you approach this? Like what would you do in terms of research? How would you structure the narrative of this? What's my sequencing of questioning?
Jeremy:
And I feel like I've pretty good instincts, but I would love somebody who has way more experience than me to say, okay, here's how we should do this and this will make a great interviewer. And you hire that person for 1 episode. You've now leveled up significantly because you know kind of how it works. And so I think, yeah, there's a lot that that could be done there even if it's a one off kind of engagement.
Justin:
Okay. What about the rest of your budget? I'm I'm just can't wait to see your TikTok budget.
Jeremy:
Okay. So I've got, $2,000 a month left. And, actually, I put $500 a month into community networking coaching, very similar to you. I think you had $1,000 a month. I started off at 1,000, put it down to 500.
Jeremy:
But this has been something that has never not paid off for me and I'm currently in several paid communities and have been continuously for the past 5 years or something like that. So I'm gonna allocate $500 a month to that. And then the final category, not TikTok but I've got $1500 a month for advertising set aside here. So here's finally I'm bringing advertising in. I've actually the the irony here is that I've actually done a decent amount of advertising over the past couple of years for my newsletter.
Jeremy:
But I have so little faith in advertising for podcasts that I'm reluctant to allocate it here. So my strategy here this depends a lot on the type of show you have. But what I would be doing here is I'm gonna assume because it's me and it's my show that I also do write a newsletter. And so I've got a podcast and I've got a newsletter and I'm gonna allocate pretty much all of that budget to getting newsletter subscribers. And then Oh my god.
Jeremy:
In the newsletter welcome sequence, I'm gonna have a similar thing where there's gonna be some segmentation where I'm gonna say, hey, You know, welcome to the newsletter. Really glad to have you here. Which one of these describes you best? And so there's gonna be a few options. And, depending on what the show is, those are gonna be different.
Jeremy:
I have something like this in my newsletter where it's like I'm focused on, you know, marketing and growth right now or sponsorships or, systems and processes or, you know, the mindset side of things. And depending on which link they click, I'm gonna follow that up automatically with a curated podcast playlist of episodes that are in that category. And so now market. They're most interested in podcast sponsorships. Let me send them a follow-up email.
Jeremy:
As soon as they click that and say, hey. Looks like you're interested in sponsorships. Here's my 3 top episodes on sponsorships. And the reason I'm going newsletter first for the advertising is that it's just way cheaper to get newsletter subscribers than it is podcast. And Mhmm.
Jeremy:
You can advertise in ways that are there's less friction. So a lot of times people are seeing this in, like, a text based social media app or something. And so going text to text is easy easier. And so I might look at, you know, Twitter ads or Facebook or Instagram ads, something like that, get them onto the newsletter, then they get an automated prompt in the welcome sequence that point them to really specific shows that they've already told me this is what I'm interested in. And that's gonna be my strategy here.
Justin:
I love that by the way. I love that idea. I just love that is I'm gonna be I'm gonna use that. That's a hot tip. Focus on getting new newsletter subscribers in the welcome sequence.
Justin:
Directing them to a custom playlist. That's brilliant because not only do you have them on your newsletter, but then you're saying, Hey, I also have a podcast. So you may be getting a podcast listener out of it, but then you're, you're customizing their entry point into the show. Like you've curated this nice little gateway into the show. That is so smart.
Justin:
I I think that's so brilliant. And perhaps you could use that in other formats too, like
Jeremy:
Mhmm.
Justin:
Specific ad campaigns that go to a landing page that say, oh, you're coming from LinkedIn. You probably care about this, this, and this. Here's a custom playlist just for you on my podcast. That is super, super smart. And there, there are some old tools that you can use to create custom RSS feeds.
Justin:
One's called huffduffer. We'll put a link in the show notes, but that just allows you to create custom podcast feeds. It can even be episodes outside of your feed, like here's an interview I did, and then you can send that individually to each of these groups. Such Interesting.
Jeremy:
That's such
Justin:
a great takeaway. I'm gonna I'm gonna use that for sure.
Jeremy:
And the other thing that I like about this is that once you get somebody on your email list, you essentially until they unsubscribe, you get infinite opportunities to present new episodes to them. Yeah. And so my kinda game plan here is like I ultimately want people on both my email list and my podcast. And so it doesn't really matter which door they come in And probably it's easier to get them on the email list. And once they're there, then I can keep sending them emails that are are gonna be valuable.
Jeremy:
I'm not spamming them. But it's like, you know, they well, I know they're interested in this. They actually signed up for the newsletter and so I'm also gonna get the podcast out there regularly. So that's my my strategy there. The the one thing that I have been really curious about and I do actually wanna experiment with this this year is running retargeting ads to people who visited my website or engaged with me in some way specifically to the podcast.
Jeremy:
And so we talked about in the social media episode that people need so many touch points with a show before they eventually listen. I would need some disposable budget to really do this. But I'm I'm really curious about like, okay. I know somebody's come to my website so that says something about them, their interest in podcasting. Maybe they've even visited and this is one of the cool things about, like, Chartable.
Jeremy:
You can actually embed a tracking pixel for Google Analytics or Facebook.
Justin:
Okay.
Jeremy:
And so people who click through your link once but don't listen, you could then say, okay. Anybody who's clicked through my chartable link ever but hasn't listened, like show them the ad on Instagram or TikTok or Google display ads too. So your show could, like, follow people around the internet. And, this is something that I think is really intriguing to me, but I have no idea how effective it would be or how much budget it would take to, you know, make it worth it.
Justin:
Yeah. And this is the thing. I mean, if you have resources, whether it's time, energy, or money, It's worth thinking about experiments. What bets could I make that might have a meaningful impact on the show? And you'll see in our budgets, like, we've said, oh, well, honestly, I think the idea of hiring a coach is a fairly high leverage one because they might be able to bring in all sorts of things you haven't thought about.
Justin:
But it could also be, you know what? I'm curious about retargeting ads, for example. I'm just going to allocate some budget and time towards this. And it might take you 3 months, 6 months to see results, good or bad. Mhmm.
Justin:
But thinking in experiments, thinking in bets, I think is the approach here. And here, we're allocating money, but this also applies to your time and your energy. And I'm hoping that's what we're prompting people to do here, is to think, oh, interesting. Like, regardless of the resource that I'm investing, I've gotta think in bets. I've gotta think in experiments.
Justin:
That's how you unlock growth. Right?
Jeremy:
Yeah. So before we sign off here, I wanna throw in one final wrinkle here. And you open it up at the start of the episode here with a question about, you know, if I had more budget, do I think I could grow the show? And I said, you know, I think actually I could do both. And so I wanna close this out by saying, let's let's go to you first and then we'll we'll throw it back to me here.
Jeremy:
But if we had zero budget, let's just assume that our current production cost so we've got our editor and we've got our hosting and all that. That's taken care of but no budget on top of that. The goal of getting to a 1,000 listeners an episode within 3 months. What's your game plan starting today?
Justin:
Partnerships, meaning, like, networking. I'm just reaching out. I'm building relationships in my space. I'm being active on different social media platforms. I'm, writing good content.
Justin:
I'm writing good questions, like, good prompting questions and getting people to interact probably on social, but also in communities like Slack and Discord, interacting on Reddit and relevant subreddits, finding Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups, finding local meetup groups, finding conferences. I think I would invest most of my time in networking because almost every time in my career where I've unlocked more potential or unlocked more leverage, it's because I met somebody who is key. So based on my own experience, it's almost all related to connecting with people. And when you do that, you kind of expand your circle of advisers. All of a sudden, you can go to 5, 10, 20 people and say, hey.
Justin:
I'm trying to grow my show to a 1,000 listeners. I'm here right now. What things do you think I should try experiment with do to unlock more growth for my show in this niche? And I think I would get a lot of leverage out of that. What about you?
Justin:
What are you investing your time and energy in?
Jeremy:
Yeah. I think it would be it would be very similar to yours where I think at the no cost level, it essentially has to be time investment. And so really the only other option is tapping into where people already are. And so my thinking around this would be to find a existing community where kinda like the party's already happening so to speak around my topic and my content. And my goal over that's let's just say that 3 months is to become known by everyone to kind of like saturate that community as somebody who has good ideas on the topic, original ideas, and is also generous in the space.
Jeremy:
And so at some point I'm probably not making many asks in the 1st month or maybe even 2. And I'm trying to like just connect with people, make friends, show up regularly with a high volume of interesting ideas. And so this is, you know, we're taking the assumption here that this is a space I have interesting ideas in and have something refreshing and and understand my angle, which that that can take years to figure out a lot of times. But Oh, I hope you
Justin:
do if you're gonna have a podcast about it.
Jeremy:
That's true. So, at this point, we're assuming that that is, already, in existence, but I'm gonna show up there and I'm just gonna be a regular, contributor to that community and get to this point where, like, one of the things that I I think about, and this has kinda happened to me when I think about how I've grown my newsletter and things like that, is I've just picked a small enough pool to play in that really most people in podcasting could know about me. There now there are pockets of podcasting. And so, you know, we all kind of pick our specific corners of it to play in. But I think podcasting is small enough that, you know, by creating blog posts and being on other shows, speaking at events, things like that, I can conceivably become generally known by most people in podcasting whether or not they know me personally but they've like, oh yeah.
Jeremy:
I've seen Jeremy around the internet. And so that's what I would try to build up that baseline awareness of people where it's like, okay. I'm not converting a cold audience here. Like most people have some impression of me. Hopefully it's positive and because I've shown up generously and contributed for a couple months with a lot of interesting ideas, it's hard to sustain it forever.
Jeremy:
But if you're doing it in a sprint format like this, I think you could almost like think about Okay. I'm gonna build up the running start and I'm gonna map out like 30 ideas that I'm gonna post like daily blog posts or tweets or something like that then I'm just gonna wow people on a consistent basis and really deliver a high volume of high quality content. And what would happen from that is I'm gonna get that awareness from the the general population but also it's gonna get the attention of other people who might be good collaborators at which point, you know, we can set up promo swaps, guesting exchanges, things like that. And, I would be trying to, you know, do probably post roles or maybe even mid roll collaborations and promo swaps, things like that. And in every episode I'm doing newsletter swaps, all that kind of stuff to try and just, like, get as much, interplay, between the people who've already established audiences in that space as possible.
Justin:
I like it. And all of the things you mentioned are way more potent before you've launched the show. So if you're if you've done that work, that baseline work, before you launch the show, and then you can go back to all of those people you've built relationships with and said, hey, I'm about to launch a show. Here's the trailer. Here's the launch date.
Justin:
If you could help me out when I launch through telling people about it, retweeting, whatever it is, I would really appreciate it. All of that investment you've done, you're basically building people that are cheering you on. Right? That it's a community of people that are like, alright. When Jeremy finally comes to me with an ask, he's given so much up to this point.
Justin:
Now he's doing something, and he needs something for me. Well, he's been so generous. I'm going to respond in kind and help him out. I'm gonna be his number one cheerleader. I'm gonna be his street team.
Justin:
I'm gonna go out and, you know, broadcast this launch to other people.
Jeremy:
Yeah. Alright. So, any I know we talked about a a number of different budget tiers here. But any kinda takeaways, maybe ways to think about budgeting that you wanna leave people with before we sign off here?
Justin:
Invest in TikTok ads. No, I'm joking. I mean, really it's experiments, thinking in bats, thinking about how much you have to allocate. I think you should do these dream budgets for yourself and think about, well, actually, you know what? I'm not at the $10,000 budget, but I have a $100 extra I could play with.
Justin:
And maybe I could get somebody to coach me for that amount. Maybe I could run a few ads for that amount. There's things that you can experiment with even if your budget is small. What about you? Any closing thoughts, things that you wanna leave people with?
Jeremy:
Yeah. I think for me, it's actually to look beyond advertising. And I think a lot of people do think about outsourcing. But as we saw from my breakdowns in every tier, outsourcing was the bulk of it. And I think the the one kind of through line here, the theme for me personally that maybe I didn't articulate is that, you know, we all have these things that we are the sole person that can do for our show.
Jeremy:
And I think that there's a lot of the creative stuff. We talked about hiring a producer, things like that. But a lot of the things that make a show great can only come from you. The best marketer for your show is is you as the host. And the reason is that we we've talked before, like, people connect with the hosts of the show.
Jeremy:
People come for the topic, but a lot of times they stay for the host. And it also actually can work the opposite where if you make a personal connection with somebody first through Twitter or any other kind of marketing, they will come for the show as well. They have to still be interested in the topic but you can also be the the inroad there for somebody who already has that relationship with you. And so I think that that's a really hard thing to outsource, because there is no other version of you and nobody else can really market the show as effectively as you can as the host. And so for me, I wanna, like, eliminate as much of the other stuff from my schedule that allows me to show up and do that on a daily basis.
Justin:
I really like that idea of freeing up your time, freeing up your mental space to focus on the things that only you can do.
Jeremy:
Yeah. So I think to, leave people here, I would love for people to get in touch with us, either through I'm gonna put this as the Spotify question. If you're listening to Spotify, you can answer right there. Otherwise get at us on, Twitter, both Justin and I and the links are in the show notes and let us know, you know, with each of these tiers what would your breakdown be of how you would spend at 5 100, 2510,000? And, I would love to see a thread here of how other people would, spend this, potentially, you know, head in the clouds type numbers all the way down to something that might be much more attainable and realistic and, and maybe even your, your current scenario.
